As Rembrandt is celebrated in a Google Doodle, Mark Hudson pays tribute to
this extraordinary artist.

It is almost incredible now to reflect that for almost 200 years following his death in 1669, no one was much interested in the art of Rembrandt Harmenz van Rijn. Today we think of Rembrandt as the great artist of humanity, the first modern artist, a painter whose fundamental honesty transcends time and place. Yet the very qualities we admire in him – the earthy truth to physical reality, the directness with which the human presence is put in front of us, the almost edibly palpable feeling for light and shade – were antithetical to the self-conscious classical refinement that dominated critical values in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

Rembrandt, as we understand him today when he is celebrated in a Google Doodle, is a creation of the 19th century, of the yearning for directness and free expression that emerged with the Romantic movement and fired up the whole Modernist behemoth. No aspect of Rembrandt’s art has been more critical in establishing him as the greatest artist of the human spirit than his self-portraits. Comprising nearly 100 works – paintings, etchings and drawings – documenting his progression from bumptious youth to frail old age, they constitute by far the largest and most detailed self-analysis created by any artist. Yet is this undeniably extraordinary body of works quite what it seems?

The portrait, from van Eyck to Picasso, is one of the great achievements of the Western tradition. The depiction of the individual human physiognomy does exist in other cultures. Yet it developed an extraordinary depth, complexity, intensity and intricacy in Western Europe in the centuries after 1400. Within this tradition, the self-portrait has come to be seen as the sub-genre that defines the form. Artist and subject being one, whole layers of self knowledge and self-ignorance, doubt, anxiety, aspiration and desire come into play. The self-portrait is at once the purest and most complex form of portraiture, a kind of self psycho-analysis centuries before the event.

Most of the great portrait painters created powerful self-portraits: Raphael, Titian, Reynolds, Goya, van Gogh, Munch and Picasso, spring immediately to mind. But in terms of the sheer volume of such works, Rembrandt takes the whole phenomenon to another level.

It has become almost a cliché to see the rise of the portrait as paralleling the development of individualism in literature and philosophy, seen in writers and thinkers as diverse as Shakespeare and Descartes. Yet Rembrandt’s self-portraiture really does seem to evoke the idea of a universal individuality. Looking at his self-portraits we are looking not just at endless images of a jowly old Dutchman, but understanding what it feels like to be inside the human skin, connected to all others, yet inalienably separate from them.

And this human journey is paralleled by a journey in paint, as the handling of the medium becomes looser and more impressionistic as the artist moves towards old age. This might be seen as simply reflecting the artist’s physical decline, his deteriorating eyesight and dwindling control of the brush. Yet it is also the trajectory we expect art to take: away from tightness, order and control, towards expressivity and abstraction. As Rembrandt invents himself in paint, so he invents Modern Art as he goes.

Rembrandt's Portrait of the Father

That at least was the view for most of the 20th century, a view popularised by the Charles Laughton-starring film of 1936, in which the moist-eyed, but resilient painter with his passionate overview of the human condition stands against the philistinism of the Amsterdam bourgeoisie, only to die in poverty and obscurity. In recent decades, however, a deluge of research into the so-called Dutch Golden Age has given us a more clear-sighted view of the imperatives of the age. The Rembrandt revealed in Simon Schama’s ‘Rembrandt’s Eyes’ is an often self-serving, occasionally ruthless individual, particularly in his dealings with women.

More recently, it’s been suggested that far from being the ultimate personal project, Rembrandt’s self-portraits are essentially adverts for his painterly technique, dashed off in the gaps between paying commissions – the artist painting himself, not from an abiding curiosity about the state of his soul, but because no other model was available.

There’s no doubt that some of the self-portraits are very much more penetrating than others. There’s a certain slick, blokish bonhomie to some of the paintings: images of a rich, self-satisfied successful artist, that can be taken, it seems, at face value. Moreover, where the paintings do betray deeper emotion there’s a sense of pathos being laid on with too large a trowel. Look at me, they seem to say, I’m coming to the end of life’s journey – and don’t I know it. Like Dickens, Rembrandt doesn’t leave you in any doubt about what you’re supposed to feel.

Yet anyone taking the trouble to look at this extraordinary body of images in chronological order will sense the universality beneath the ever-changing form of this very particular set of features. It’s a universality that will be particularly apparent to the average middle aged man. It’s the feeling we have every morning when we look in the mirror and think, ‘God, is that me?’ Most of us shave or complete our ablutions, go to work and preoccupy ourselves with other things. Rembrandt, however, keeps on looking at the ever-pouchier cheeks, the increasingly hunted look in the eyes of a man once unshakably confident in his powers, at the impact of time in transforming his features into a form he barely recognises, yet has no option but to accept.